Proposals - Getting Started Getting Better: Your Indispensable Guide to Surviving (and Thriving!) in Proposal Land

By Isabel Gibson

Welcome to Proposal Land:

•     Where companies move heaven and earth to respond to inconsistent and difficult-to-interpret Requests for Proposals (RFPs) against hard deadlines
•     Where RFP issuers routinely ask for twice as much information as can reasonably be gathered and presented in the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Sep 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772570397

Book preview

Introduction

Reconnoitring Proposal Land

Proposals are simple. Using the various sections of the Request for Proposals (RFP), clients tells us what product or service they want, what the contractual relationship will be, how we should present our proposal, and how they will evaluate it. Using that information we make a plan to give them what they want, write a fully costed proposal that describes this plan, and submit our proposal to meet the hard deadline. It sounds simple enough.

At the thirty-thousand-foot level, it is simple: it just isn’t simple or easy on the ground. Why not? Would that it were just one or two things: that, we could handle. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why it gets ugly on the ground. Some drive uncertainty and risk, some just drive work.

If you’ve been tapped on the shoulder to work on a proposal, you might be thinking, Now what? or even, Please, not me! Proposals are notorious for burning people out, and at a minimum can certainly be miserable: a mad scramble to meet the deadline, amid conflict within the team.

But proposals can also be satisfying: the knowledge of a job well done, with a team that clicks. Is there a way to transform potential misery into actual satisfaction, not just for yourself but for the entire team?

Yes!

Distilling my twenty-plus years in Proposal Land, this book orients newbies to the basics and alerts adepts to things I learned the hard way. Drawing on my specialty, it has a particular emphasis on proposal writing and editing, but includes tips on a range of proposal management topics:

Managing proposal teams

Scheduling

Understanding the requirement

Developing and effectively presenting solutions to meet the requirement

Handling reviews

Producing a great document on time

And all without having — or causing — any heart attacks!

What the Blue Text Means

Additional detail or slight digressions are in shaded boxes like this one.

Stories used to illustrate the tips appear in green like this one. These stories are real but anonymized events: to protect the privacy of those who were there — the people and the companies — details irrelevant to the point have been changed or omitted.

Using This Book

How should you use this book? That depends on your situation.

New to proposals?

Start at chapter 1 to understand what proposals are all about. Then explore chapter 2, which will orient you to the work environment, including the strange language spoken in Proposal Land. Then read about your assigned task(s) in chapters 4 to 11.

Not so new?

Go straight to the chapter that provides detail on executing your task(s).

In trouble?

Don’t despair. Others have (almost undoubtedly!) been exactly where you are. Check the Index for tips by task.

Teaching?

Use the Table of Contents and Index to find the topics on which you want more information or practical examples.

• • •

CHAPTER 1

The Very Beginning

Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start.

Do-Re-Mi

The Sound of Music

Great advice! Let’s follow it.

This section looks at the lay of the land just outside the gates of Proposal Land: at the events leading up to that call to disrupt your life by working on a proposal team. In trying to understand that landscape, it considers two perspectives: the client’s and the supplier’s.

Where It All Begins:

The Client’s Perspective

From the client’s perspective, it all begins with recognizing a need: either client personnel see it on their own, or a potential supplier helpfully points it out by making a sales call. And just like that, the game is afoot.

Understanding needs

What are needs in an organizational context?

Needs are capability gaps: something that a product or a service or a combination of products and services might fill. Needs are often driven by something changing, whether internally, externally, or both:

An existing contract expires, driving a need to make arrangements for the same products or services to be provided throughout the next period (think something routine, like raw materials for production, or something a little more complex, like facilities maintenance services).

Things wear out and have to be replaced (think everything from carpets to helicopters).

Organization growth drives a need for more or bigger things (think vehicle fleets and office buildings) and for more far-flung services (think regional versus national versus international shipping and logistics services).

Population growth drives a need for more or bigger things (think roads and hospitals) and for services (think administration of drivers’ licences that let people drive on those roads, and health cards that let them access hospital services).

New regulations or new market expectations drive needs (think recycling and hazardous materials management products or services; or information management systems and applications for privacy purposes).

New cost pressures drive a need for increased efficiency (think outsourcing of non-core services and better online capability, allowing customers to serve themselves).

New technology makes new capabilities available (think new materials for personal protective vests or for armoured vehicles) or necessary for continuing to compete effectively (think website development and distance education).

Translating needs into requirements

In the (very) beginning was the need. And the need was without form.

Once a need is identified, the next step is to refine it into a clear statement of the requirement, starting by identifying the real need. Once the real need is identified — which constrains the acceptable solutions — other factors come into play, constraining even further how that need might be met.

Performance. Are there security, confidentiality, or privacy considerations that must be satisfied? Quality performance standards that must be met? Environmental vulnerabilities or protection measures that must be considered?

Cost. What can the organization afford to pay for the desired capability? Would it be cheaper to rent or to buy? What degree of price certainty and inflation protection does the organization need?

Schedule. How soon is the capability needed, either in absolute terms or relative to some other activity? For how long? Does it make sense to contract for the entire term now, or to break it up?

Risk. Are there performance, cost, or schedule impacts of bundling the provision of diverse products and services, or of splitting them up?

Politics. Are there organizations that must be used, or not used? Groups, disadvantaged or otherwise, that must receive a benefit?

What’s the Real Need?

To build a new road; or to move a specified number of people by any means between identified locations at predictable times of the day and days of the week; or to somehow reduce congestion on existing roads?

To build a new hospital; or to provide accessible primary care to an expanding urban population; or to support frail seniors in non-institutional environments?

To replace an aging vehicle fleet; or to provide reliable and flexible transportation for service workers; or to put service workers into electronic contact with customers in the field?

To simplify management by focusing on core competencies; or to cut costs by outsourcing non-core services; or both?

To replace or to enhance current capability or performance?

And so it continues. Step by iterative step, the organization defines and refines its need into a more and more precise — and a more and more restrictive — statement of the requirement. Sometimes those iterations involve potential suppliers.

Consulting and Sole Sourcing

Depending on the complexity of the requirement and the stability of the technology for meeting it, this stage can involve extensive informal consultations with industry representatives to find out about the options for meeting the need. In government contracting, this stage usually ends with the issuance of a Request for Proposals, or RFP, sometimes with preliminary drafts circulated for review and comments. The private sector uses RFPs, too, but some needs are met less formally (even much less formally, through discussions and negotiations with just one supplier).

Why do RFPs come into it at all?

Organizations with money to spend use RFPs for two primary reasons:

The first reason is to discipline procurement activities, to be more confident of getting value for money, whether that means the best idea or technical solution, or the most competitive price, or some mix of wonderful idea/solution and good price.

The second reason is to drive transparency and integrity into how money is used, so that donors, shareholders, or taxpayers will be happy campers.

Why Don’t They Always Sole Source?

Sole-sourcing isn’t usually an option for large government contracts. In government of Canada contracting, for example, contracts exceeding $25,000 are to be competed unless only one supplier can legitimately meet the need-as-defined. There’s a formal procurement practice — the Advanced Contract Award Notice (ACAN) — that lets other potential suppliers put up their hands and say, Hey! We could do that, too, so you should compete this!

In private-sector pursuits, the direct-to-contract option is more available, ranging from one-off contracts to strategic relationships (often established at the board of directors level) that specify suppliers for certain products or services.

What’s in an RFP?

Using unnecessarily obscure and varied jargon, RFPs typically have six parts:

The overview introduces the client and the need as the client sees it.

The description of the Work specifies the products, services, reports, and other deliverables that the client wants.

The draft contract specifies the client’s proposed terms and conditions for the eventual contract with the winning bidder.

The description of the response process lays out the schedule of milestones (for example, the deadline for asking questions or the date for the site visit) and specifies the rules under which the procurement will be governed.

The response instructions specify how bidders should prepare their proposals:

•What content should or must be included and how to organize and label it

•How to present costs or price or the request for money

•When and where to submit the proposal, in what format, in how many copies, and in what kind of packaging

The evaluation process and criteria describe how the response will be marked: the stages of the evaluation process, and how much each section is worth and how it will be graded.

How Do the Rules Work?

There are rules for what the client is allowed to do and not do (including not necessarily issuing a contract to anyone, so there!), the expected schedule for the process, and the plan for how proposals will be evaluated.

There are also rules for what bidders can, must, and must not do during the procurement process; for example, Bidders can ask questions, must attend a site visit, and must not politick for their selection.

Do the rules hold? That depends. In Proposal Land, schedules often slip (that is, get extended) and that’s just too bad. The evaluation plan, on the other hand, is sacred, at least in government procurements. Private-sector clients have more flexibility to adapt to reality (or even just to make it up as they go along), but governments can’t change the rules of the game after the fact, for reasons of transparency and for fear of a contract award’s being challenged in court by a losing bidder.

Recap

That’s pretty much it from the client’s perspective: see a need, define the requirement, issue an RFP, and the proposals come rolling in! What could be simpler?

For a preliminary answer to that question, we have to see what it looks like on the supplier’s side.

Where It All Begins:

The Supplier’s Perspective

From the supplier’s perspective, it all begins with recognizing an opportunity: either supplier personnel see a need on their own, or a potential client helpfully points it out by issuing an RFP. And just like that, the game is afoot.

Identifying opportunities before an RFP is issued

How does a supplier organization find out about opportunities before an RFP is issued or, maybe, even thought about? By understanding three things:

The industry

The clients

Its own self

Understanding the Industry

What client needs do existing products or services fill?

What regulatory, technological, and management trends are driving new needs?

What are the trends in financing the provision of products or services?

What are competitors doing, both here and abroad?

Understanding the Clients

What do they spend their money on, when, and under what approval process?

What makes their businesses work well? What would make them work better?

Do they care mostly about cost, schedule, or performance?

What do their end-users care about?

What contracts do they have now, and when are they coming up for re-bid?

What are they talking about outsourcing?

Are they growing? If so, where?

What pressure do they face from competitors?

Understanding Its Own Self

What products or services does it provide, where, to what standard, in what volume, and to what schedule?

What does it do distinctively well? What sets it apart from its competitors?

What doesn’t it do well, or at all?

Whether it’s providing existing or new products or services to existing or new clients, opportunities are many and varied, even if not exactly endless:

New technology can drive major acquisition opportunities almost all by itself as well as new services opportunities, such as IT system security.

Rapid technological change can create an opportunity to offer the use of equipment and support for that equipment.

Client workload that fluctuates in volume or that demands only occasional use of highly skilled personnel or expensive equipment can make it cheaper for clients to contract for surge capacity than to hire full-time staff and buy the requisite equipment. Similarly, clients working in a region where they lack resources can find it cheaper to contract with a local supplier than to establish permanent staff and infrastructure.

Economic troubles or ideological shifts that renew management’s focus on cutting costs can lead to the outsourcing of services formerly provided by in-house personnel.

Public/private partnerships can offer cash-strapped governments a way to get new infrastructure without committing their own (scarce) capital.

New Opportunities? Just Think.

New technology: Think airplanes, ships, radar systems, and weapons systems (who doesn’t need or want the latest toys?).

Rapid technological change: Think turnkey computer systems, refreshed every three years, with support provided from call centres wherever; think cell phones, technically obsolete every few months or so, provided and refreshed on an agreed schedule.

Fluctuating workload: Think staff for seasonal training programs; inspectors of elevators, corrosion on radar antennas, or high-voltage transmission lines; window washers in roofed stadiums; laboratory services like soil or water analysis, or equipment calibration.

New focus on cost cutting: For government clients, think privatization of liquor sales and airport operation and facility maintenance; for private-sector clients, think the provision of remote camps to mining companies.

Public/private partnerships: Think the design, build, finance, and maintain for a few decades model for new highways, hospitals, and schools.

Evaluating opportunities

Once an opportunity is identified, the real work begins: assessing the fit between the opportunity and the organization, and then starting to develop a plan to meet that need. This step is usually iterative, with an initial quick pass to see if it’s of any interest, followed by successively more detailed assessments as more is learned about the opportunity.

Implicitly or explicitly, suppliers use six questions to assess and to prepare for the opportunity: ideally, this happens before any RFP is issued.

Go or No-go?

After an RFP is issued but before much has been expended on the proposal effort, most suppliers use some kind of go/no-go decision process, but a go isn’t final until the proposal is submitted. Sufficiently strong contraindications can shut down a pursuit abruptly, including during the narrow window after the proposal is completed but before it’s submitted. See the Proposal Tasks section: Managing the Pursuit.

Question #1

Does the need-as-defined align with the organization’s capabilities/strengths?

This question is most easily asked and answered in the negative: Is something not right? Opportunities can go awry (for the supplier organization at least) at several levels:

The procurement strategy can go awry. Is the client considering splitting or bundling the Work in a way that would make the opportunity unattractive, or even untenable?

The scope of work can go awry. Does the Work involve financial or reputational risks that the organization doesn’t usually take on and that the board of directors likely won’t accept? Sometimes it’s just too hard.

The Work standards can go awry. Are the client’s service expectations unreasonable (in timeliness, quality or both), given the organization’s resources?

The contractual terms and conditions can go awry. Are the client’s expectations reasonable and acceptable? If not, the organization might decide not to bid for fear of losing proprietary knowledge, first to the client and then maybe to a competitor.

Examples of Going Awry

Procurement strategy: Dividing the Work into functional specialties might mean that a big player with big capability and big overheads can’t bid cost-effectively on the individual contracts. On the other hand, a mom ’n’ pop shop that does just one thing might be dismayed to see a large contract bundling several service areas, making it impossible for them to bid at all.

Scope of work: The organization might provide and service water pumps, but not in a war zone; or it might provide air-side services at airports, but never tackle the higher liability task of transferring fuel into airplanes.

Work standards: There might be a response time that the organization can’t meet (no way, no how), or not in all locales.

Contract: The client might expect to own something that the organization’s business model relies on as its intellectual property: the design for an IT system, the system itself, or a quality or training methodology.

Question #2

Can the need be redefined for better alignment?

If things aren’t looking good at this stage, can the client be convinced to redefine the need in a way that suits the organization better? This is generally known as influencing the requirement, since bringing the client to its senses seems sort of presumptuous.

For government opportunities, at least, there are strategic procurement consultants that help companies do several things in a coordinated way:

Articulate what they want to see in a procurement

Identify government policy that might support their position

Identify politicians and bureaucrats who could shape the procurement

Lay out a communications and contact strategy

Procurement Consultants

Are they effective? They can be. The earlier they start, the better, though.

Are they cheap? Is anything worthwhile cheap?

Are they worth it? Absolutely: if the contract itself is critical to the organization, if any changes needed are central to the client’s procurement plan, or if the changes affect the go/no-go decision.

Question #3

Does the organization have a bright idea for how to meet the need as defined or as redefined?

What’s wanted here is a way to go cheaper or better (think higher quality, faster, less risky) or both cheaper and better, depending on what the client cares about. If there is no such bright idea available, then an organization might, quite reasonably, decide not to pursue the opportunity.

Question #4

Would having one or more teaming partners help to meet the need?

Companies almost never form true partnerships in Proposal Land, but they do form prime/subcontractor relationships, joint ventures, and consortia for several reasons.

If having teaming partners looks like a good or a necessary idea, then the time to start looking for them is as soon as possible after the opportunity is identified. Teaming has contractual, political, and practical considerations to resolve: It takes a long time to arrange and not insignificant time to manage and maintain.

Why Companies Team Up

To reduce technical risk by getting another company to provide some of the required products or services

To meet a client policy requirement (for example, in Canada, meeting Federal Government Industrial and Regional Benefits requirements or satisfying Aboriginal content targets; in the USA, using small and disadvantaged businesses)

To share the financial risk

To add political clout to the team

All of the above

Question #5

What are those pesky competitors up to?

Does a competitor have an established or special relationship with the client or an exclusive arrangement with a single important specialist that will make it more than usually difficult for the organization to win the work? Has a competitor been working diligently with this client to influence the requirement, defining the need in terms that suit that competitor’s strengths? If a competitor has a lead, it’s worth evaluating whether it’s insurmountable.

Question #6

Is it worth it? Can it even be done?

A major proposal can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and monopolize resources for months. Even a small proposal sucks resources from other activities, both marketing and operational. The opportunity under consideration must be worth the opportunity cost, as it were: the estimated value of opportunities foregone to pursue this one.

Moreover, even for the ones that are worth pursuing, the organization must have the gear to pursue it, both along the long, dusty pre-RFP trails and up the steep hills during the proposal effort. At that stage it’s all money out the door without any money coming in, or any guarantee of same at the end of the day.

Choose Wisely

Organizations can chase anything, but not everything.

(With thanks to a now-at-peace Knight Templar)

Recap

That’s pretty much it from the supplier’s perspective: identify an opportunity, evaluate it, and begin to pursue the ones selected as worthwhile and feasible. When the RFP is issued, suppliers launch their planned proposal effort and all is right with the world.

That’s the theory, anyway: the reality is a little more complicated, a little messier (as always, no?). To ease into those complications, the next chapter takes a look at proposal basics.

CHAPTER 2

Proposal Basics

Proposal Anatomy

Before we look at what’s in a typical proposal (and there’s both good news and bad news, here, I’m just warning you now), let’s consider the types of proposals. Proposals are not all the same, not by a long shot.

What kinds of proposals are there?

Many kinds. Why? Two reasons.

The first reason is that people write proposals in response to RFPs issued by two sorts of organizations:

Organizations that have money to award for community projects or scientific research grants; think United Way and the National Research Council, in Canada; and the Rockefeller Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the USA

Organizations that have money to spend on products or services; think private-sector companies (especially larger ones), and all levels of government (municipal, provincial/territorial/state, federal)

The second reason is that what is meant by proposal varies a lot, from the really simple to the really complex. And while this classification addresses the range of proposals, it doesn’t begin to address their variety.

As for the content of proposals, I like to get the bad news out of the way first . . .

The Range of Proposals

Really simple: A pricing sheet for various quantities of a product

Pretty simple: A set of off-the-shelf lists of projects and biographies of personnel proposed for a project, assembled (but not modified) to demonstrate organizational and team experience and capabilities, respectively

Moderately complex: A plan to provide services (think management consulting, facilities operation, administrative services for student loan programs) or a plan that has been tailored to meet a client’s requirements, supported by project sheets and personnel biographies tailored to show they apply to this opportunity

Really complex: A design for infrastructure (think hospitals) or equipment (think airplanes, ships, and trains) that has been customized to meet hundreds of pages of technical specifications, and a maintenance plan to support said hospital, airplane, ship, or train for decades of service

What’s in a typical proposal: The bad news

As you see by now, there really is no such thing as a typical proposal. As a result, this is a tough question that probably can’t be answered except by going industry by industry, and maybe not even then!

The things that clients might reasonably want to know depend hugely on what they’re buying, and that’s pretty complicated, as you’ll see over there to the right.

Yet even after answering those questions, we’ve really just started:

How big is this opportunity compared to the client’s entire operation? Compared to the typical contractor’s? What are the implications of the work scope? Can one company do all the work, or will several companies have to work together?

What’s the work environment like? Are there environmental protection concerns? Issues around worker or public safety? Problems with weather or restricted site access (seasonally or otherwise)? Will the contractor have to work closely with other providers of products or services?

What are the community and political environments like? Is there a